“My photographs will take you to a world, that has been for many, inaccessible.” Roger Ballen

Reflex Amsterdam is thrilled to announce a double-sided exhibition of work by internationally acclaimed photographer Roger Ballen. Divided into two, the show comprises a mini retrospective of 30 or so works, alongside a selection of 150 polaroid images, which condense his singular vision in a small, affordable format.

Ballen is one of the world’s greatest photographers. He picked up a camera in the late 1960s and has never put it down. His extraordinary oeuvre comprises some of the most arresting and original images ever produced. “Ballenesque” – a term firmly part of the lexicon – is synonymous with his rich monochrome vision, his acute psychological insight, and his constant reinvention of his artistic style.

“My purpose in taking photographs over the past 40 years has ultimately been about defining myself. It has been fundamentally a psychological and existential journey. If an artist is one who spends his life trying to define his being, I suppose I would have to call myself an artist.”

A RETROSPECTIVE

Roger Ballen was born in New York in 1950, but has lived and worked in South Africa for over 30 years. A geologist by training, his work took him to explore the hidden world of South African towns. There, he produced extraordinary images of the empty streets bleached by the sun, but it was once he started knocking on people’s doors, he discovered a world within, that would have a profound and defining effect on his work. These closed interiors, strewn with mysterious objects, and no less intriguing inhabitants, took him on a path from social critique to the creation of metaphors for the inner mind. “I went inside metaphorically and literally,” he has said.

Ballen’s oeuvre can roughly be divided into series. Each series is captured in his iconic monographs – Boyhood, Dorps, Platteland, Outland, Shadow Chamber, Boarding House, Asylum of the Birds, Theatre of Apparitions – each the result of five years intensive scrutiny behind the lens.

A hit YouTube film, “Ballenesque”, has drawn many into his singular world, uniting his long-term collectors with a younger generation. His video with the cult band Die Antwoord of the song “I Fink U Freeky”, has collected over 100m hits on YouTube, bringing his aesthetic viscerally to life.

The Reflex Amsterdam show presents a chance to see a condensed selection of life work in an intimate space. A display of 30 limited edition large-scale images (40x40cm or 90x90cm) from his early work to the present.

THE POLAROIDS

“I first started taking polaroid photographs in 1963 after I obtained a camera for my Bar Mitzvah present from my aunt. To this day, I can remember the smell of the liquid that one put over the black and white images to preserve them.

Polaroids have always had a magical feeling to them. This was especially true years ago, when it took time to process the images that one shot on film.
When I first moved to South Africa I would take polaroid photographs of the African people I met. Like myself, they were enamoured by this media.”

Commissioned for Reflex Amsterdam, Ballen has turned his vision to the classic polaroid format, in a selection of 150 unique images. An extension of the series Ballen is working on currently, these polaroids constitute the first display of colour images by the artist during his entire career.

“A photograph has to feel as if it can never occur again.”

This element of the Reflex show presents an incredible opportunity to own an original Roger Ballen image.

The exhibition will be accompanied by two new publications.

'Ballenesque, Roger Ballen A Retrospective' (Thames & Hudson)
A book of nearly 350 pages documents the development of Ballen’s photographic style over a period of 50 years.

'Roger Ballen - Polaroids' (Reflex Editions)
Published on the occasion of the exhibition at Reflex Amsterdam this publication gives a unique overview of Ballen’s Polaroids from 2016 until now.

Roger Ballen’s work is housed in the permanent collections of some of the world’s greatest art institutions from MoMA, New York to LACMA, Los Angeles to The Pushkin Museum of Art, Moscow, Tate Britain, London and many more.

In Evelyn Taocheng Wang’s second solo show at Galerie Fons Welters, the artist creates an atmosphere which brings you into the Four Season of Women Tragedy. The exhibition title refers to the phases which are characteristic to womanhood, according to Wang’s fantasies. The stable cycle of the four seasons becomes a metaphor for female life, in which small moments of tragedy occur. For Wang, tragedy cannot only be found in the great sensational and antique connotation of the notion, but rather in small, personal moments.

In the exhibition, the garments play the leading role and each garment has an individual story. Without exception, all the clothes are from the–by Wang highly admired–French fashion brand Agnčs B. The pieces come from Wang's own wardrobe, which brings a tangible intimacy. It is almost as if you were browsing through someone else’s wardrobe. Wang sets a mood that not only stems from personal experience, but that is also the cause of imagination. She urges you to “imagine an attractive image in your head, and those so-called amazing identities in your heart: maybe they are not really that real, but are real."

Agnčs B. is for Wang the ultimate example of the European sophisticated woman, as seen from the perspective of the Asian woman. It is her image of the old European glamorous ‘fancy’ era with limitless possibilities, which are in stark contrast to the current ‘trashy’ times we live in. The clothes are not too gaudy or pretentious, but rather neutral as they play with femininity’s and masculinity’s role of dress codes. Wang explores the idea that you can create an identity with clothes, which provides you with a comfortability that allows for the freedom to be free with yourself. Her garments appear in and together with the drawings, as part of different stories. These stories are “tragic” stories that Wang collected from her friends. She posted on Facebook, asking her friends to send her stories: “Please donate your personal tragical stories, and I am going to use them as artistic reference, to make drawings!”

Wang's Agnčs B. clothes are also a part of the story of the four sculptures in the middle of the gallery, which all refer to one of the four seasons. These sculptures celebrate the baroque, supported by the luxurious wooden material used by Wang as a counterpart to today's
'trashy' aesthetics. In the sound work accompanying the exhibition, the four seasons are again recognizable. The boat sculpture is reminiscent of the sea, creating a connection between her work and the Rotterdam harbour, as in Jogging on Rotterdam Harbour. For Wang, the harbour symbolizes a place of undecided travel. The stones in the middle of the room contribute to this undecidedness, and simultaneously refer to Virginia Woolf, who ended her life by walking into water wearing a stone-filled jacket. Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse was a great source of inspiration for Wang in this exhibition. The main character of To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe, struggles with her own position and identity in relation to her parents, but she also struggles with male and female gender roles and the power structures attached to those roles. Briscoe wants to find herself, to prove herself. Wang connects to Briscoe on an emotional and intellectual level when the character states that, being a painter also, she hates that “women cannot write, women cannot draw.”

Wang deliberately uses the role that social media plays in creating an identity, which resides itself in an “addicted documentation”. She writes personal messages or posts pictures of calligraphy in her recognizable ‘chinglish’ (Chinese English) on Instagram and Facebook, which regularly return in her work. She is often photographed in the places she visits, or takes us into her home setting, posing in one of her favorite Agnčs B. pieces. The photographs that Wang shows in the exhibition are taken as spontaneous snapshots of daily life, but at the same time have a stylish, glamorous, and almost editorial character. The elegant old times so adored by Wang revive in the volatile social media. Instagram photos are for Wang a second-hand documentation of reality: a reality that she turns into a fancy imagination, which vanishes amongst borderlines of definitions.

Nicolás Lamas’ work revolves around the interaction between things, where they coexist and create different associations, exchanges and combinations without established rules. His method can be seen as a series of speculative exercises where everything is part of a cyclical process of transmitting information and energy, through which intuition, chance, play and physics determine his connection with objects and images. This generates a heterogeneous, multi-layered and context-specific body of work.

Lamas is also presenting his new book The Attraction of the Mountains, published by Posture Editions and launched during the exhibition opening.

Slewe Gallery is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition In Search of Red, Yellow and Blue by Steven Aalders, in which the result of his residence at the Van Doesburghuis in Meudon near Paris this Summer will be shown. The exhibition opens Saturday November 4. It will be on view during Amsterdam Art Weekend (23-26 November) and will remain on view until December 16.

During his four months stay in the famous studio house of the founder of De Stijl movement (1917-1931) Aalders explored the concept of the Golden Section in relation to the primary colours. There will be three series of paintings on view. In one of the series, entitled Section d’or, the surface of the paintings is gradually divided into more planes following the Golden Section ratio in different shades of grey paint. They are built up from mixing purely three primary colours, red, yellow and blue with some white to a neutral grey, not using any black, grey or other colour. Another series show the primary colours, red, yellow or blue, each in relation to a mid tone grey. These series are an homage to Van Doesburg’s colour theory in which he proclaims the colour grey gives a platform for bright colour planes. The third series show two squares interpenetrate each other, dividing three primary colour planes in different shades from bright to dark and greyish tones. As an homage to Van Doesburg Aalders will place a white cube central in his exhibition.

Aalders is known for his carefully hand painted geometric abstract oil paintings. He evokes the history of modern abstraction, referring to the origins of Constructivism and Minimal Art. His work is an attempt to embody the essence, to create light and space through paint. Modernist serial principles such as repetition and sameness are both connected to older traditions in Western art and Non-Western abstract art. Different colour concepts are being investigated. The multi-layered oil paintings demand a concentrated eye from the beholder.

Steven Aalders, born in 1959 in Middelburg (NL), lives and works in Amsterdam. He studied in London at Croydon College of Art and at Ateliers 63 in Haarlem (NL). In 2002 he had a solo exhibition, entitled Vertical Thoughts, at the S.M.A.K. in Ghent in Belgium and in 2010 his exhibition Cardinal Points opened at the Gemeentemuseum The Hague, on which occasion a catalog was published with an overview of fifteen years work, including texts by Benno Tempel, Rudi Fuchs, Thomas Lange and Steven Aalders himself. In Autumn 2017 ‘The Fifth Line, Thoughts of a Painter’ will be published by Koenig Books. His work has been internationally collected by both private and public collections such as the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, AKZO Nobel Art Foundation, Caldic Collection/Museum Voorlinden and Museum Kurhaus Kleve (DE).

In celebration of Amsterdam Art Weekend 2017, The Merchant House has asked Elsa Tomkowiak and Mary Sue to interpret the gallery’s building, rich with Golden Age symbolism, as a contemporary public sphere. Using both spoofing techniques and serious art, they—Tomkowiak in painting and Mary Sue in video, sculpture, and photography—join forces to give the interior topography a provoking and provocative face-lift. In so doing, the artists also address individually, and emphatically with respect to their art, the underlying theme of TMH’s Making Things Happen: Young Artists in Dialogue cycle: How does a young artist inscribe herself in the history of an art medium? In the case of Mary Sue and Tomkowiak, the question refers to performance and a performative gesture in art making.

With a chance to exploit her adopted identity to the full, Mary Sue decks herself out as a trim housemaid to burnish the canonical fixtures of the Amsterdam bourgeois residence. Bent on a dramatic entry and transgressing the cannons of working with paint, Tomkowiak opens the space up to the spirit of liberty and munificence. French artists of the same generation and artistic formation, Tomkowiak and Mary Sue have featured in solo and group shows as well as festival commissions. They are on a mission to experiment:

About Elsa Tomkowiak
Elsa Tomkowiak (1981, FR) has been in search of the most radical painting tools beginning with her art studies at ENSA of Dijon. Reflecting her predilection for an open gesture and the day-glow colors of a personal gradient, her earliest color interventions were made in the snow and on large vinyl surfaces suspended above industrial waste. Wielding broom-like brushes, she adopted a method of applying layers of multicolored paint to translucent or solid bands of plastic sheeting, or to massive spheres that can be positioned to redirect light and restructure the space. Her recent commissions and residencies include a swimming pool (Mönchengladbach), an opera house (Nantes), an abbey (Angers), two bridges (Saint-Gervais, Quebec), the glasshouse of a spa (Pougues-les-eaux), as well as landscaping during major urban events (Offenbach am Main, Amiens, Verdun).

About Mary Sue
Mary Sue states that otherness starts within oneself, that she was born between 1979 and sometime now, and that her gender identity might be female or science (also relating to her top performance in physics) fictional. Under this sobriquet, she has pursued a relentless career (not by-passing ENSA of Dijon for art studies) performing in her own videos, making costumes and decor, posters and books, but also sculptures, installation objects, and photographs—all fabricated to perfection by hand and surrounding the exploits of the brilliant, fictive Mary Sue. According to co-curator Hubert Besacier, we find her in situations—be it in a gallery show or on display at a Nike store—that are “totally desperate, and therefore hilarious.” Mary Sue’s crafted take on childhood and loss, Le Flotte, was seen this summer desperately afloat on the river in Amiens, France, for the Art, villes et paysage festival.

Sweeping through TMH’s walls, floors, windows, ceilings, and terraces with the exigency of their craft, both artists construct a probing play of color as a cultural value. With confident proficiency in their medium, they are able to create a unique artistic exchange that invites viewers to join in and enjoy. The relational and artistic aspects of their dialogue are, however, both real and illusory, intimating telling slippages in modern day sociability and bonding.

About The Merchant House
A self-supporting art space, TMH presents and sells contemporary art. Established by Marsha Plotnitsky, Artistic Director, in 2012 as a modern take on the Amsterdam tradition of a merchant, it promotes a cultural dialogue in the city. It has organized thematic exhibitions for international and Dutch innovators, such as Henk Peeters, Jan Schoonhoven, André de Jong, Chuck Close, Carolee Schneemann, Hilarius Hofstede, Craigie Horsfield, Judit Reigl, and Pino Pinelli. Each exhibition is accompanied by related cultural and research events.

To attend our events, please RSVP: invitations@merchanthouse.nl
Entry to exhibitions and events at TMH is free

André Kertész (1894-1985) is renowned for the exceptional contribution he made to the visual language of 20th-century photography with his poetic work. Foam presents a retrospective of his oeuvre, examining his early work created in his homeland of Hungary, his time in Paris – where between 1925 and 1936, he was a leading figure in avant-garde photography – through to New York, where he lived for nearly fifty years. In an interview, Kertész once said: “Everybody can look, but they don’t necessarily see.” Mirroring Life explores his creative capacity, using unusual compositions to create a new perspective of reality. It is an homage to the photographer whom Henri Cartier-Bresson viewed as one of his mentors.

Anonymous flâneur
At a very early age André Kertész was drawn to the photography he saw in illustrated magazines as a child. In 1912, after his study in Business Administration, he bought his first camera from his first pay cheque. His hobby quickly gained the upper hand. He photographed farmers, gypsies and landscapes and made playful compositions featuring his brothers as extras. Even when he was called into the army in 1914, he took his camera with him. However, the photographs he took during the war sooner resemble a personal diary than a news report. In 1925, he left Hungary and moved to Paris. More than other photographers of his time, such as Jacques Henri Lartigue, who focused on his own flamboyant lifestyle, or Brassaď, who voyeuristically captured the cabarets and forbidden temptations of nocturnal Paris, Kertész worked as an anonymous flâneur. He observed the city, taking in its cafés and parks, or simply looked out of the window of his flat. He photographed his artist friends, shop windows, posters and symbols on the street, shadows cast by trees, passers-by, children playing, a pair of glasses laying on a table – simple things, but always captured from a unique perspective, through which he found poetry in the mundane.

Rediscovery
In 1936, Kertész traded Paris in for New York, where he went to work for the Keystone agency. He intended to return to Paris after a year or two, and left the majority of his negatives in France. However, due to a lack of income and the outbreak of World War II returning was no longer an option. For many years, his work was not valued in New York. That was until 1964, when John Szarkowski, the new curator of photography at MoMA, rediscovered his work and organised a solo exhibition to showcase it. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue containing 64 photographs. In 1963, Kertész also retrieved the negatives that he had left in France in 1936, significantly enlarging his depleted oeuvre.

Poetic
In 1984, a year before his death, Kertész donated 100,000 negatives, 15,000 colour slides, many letters and other personal documents to the French Ministry of Culture, of which some 200 selected photographs and various historical documents can be seen in the exhibition. The black-and-white photos in the exhibition are modern silver gelatine prints made from those negatives. Mirroring Life offers a chronological overview of Kertész’ 70-year artistic oeuvre: the Hungarian period (1912-1925), his time in Paris (1925-1936), the American period in New York (1936-1985) and the international period that followed the reassessment of his work. It was in this final period that he rediscovered his artistic soul, departing on numerous trips that allowed his photography to flourish anew. Kertész’ best-known and most respected work is shot in black-and-white, but the exhibition also features a small selection of colour photographs. These works have been rarely published or displayed, hence they have remained a less well-known element of his oeuvre. Despite a variety of periods and circumstances, themes and styles, Mirroring Life reveals the consistent poetic approach in the work of André Kertész.

This exhibition is organised with Jeu de Paume, Paris, in collaboration with la Médiathčque de l’architecture et du patrimoine, ministčre de la Culture – France and diChroma photography.
Mirroring Life by André Kertész can be seen from 15 September 2017 - 10 January 2018 at Foam.Note to editors: For information and visual material, and/or for general enquiries about Foam, including Print Sales (Foam Editions), Bookshop and Collection, please check www.foam.org/press or contact the Press Office of Foam on +31 (0)20 5516500 / pressoffice@foam.org. Foam is supported by the BankGiro Loterij, De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek, Delta Lloyd, the City of Amsterdam, Olympus and the VandenEnde Foundation.